Seattle, where the weather is unlikely to kill you in an interesting fashion.

Scratched wrote:

I think the problem is a bit worse than that, at least from a UK viewpoint. Each part of someone's education/career is only really concerned with themselves. For example a school only cares about the marks they get(*), universities pay lip service to skills that are going to be useful to earn a wage from (*2), and employers that expect the ideal employee to land in their lap (*3) yet don't want to invest in training. Another major factor which is sufficiently educating kids in the facts of getting a job and preparing them to make good decisions at the age we're asking them to make those decisions.

It's not a problem that's limited to liberal arts or non-vocational degrees. I got a Masters in Avionics, and here I am, 12 years into an engineering career, having worked in aerospace jobs my entire career, many of them in an avionics-specific role.

Care to guess what percentage of the things I learned at university I've used over those 12 years?

Maybe 1%, if I'm being generous. Four years of busting ass (well, 1 year of getting drunk and 3 years of busting ass if we're honest) didn't qualify me for sh*t. What it did was get my foot in the door for my first job, and everything since then has been based on experience and an increasingly impressive-looking resume. When I interviewed for my current job (5 years ago), it was the experience I had in previous jobs that landed me this one, not the letters after my name or the knowledge that came with them (although to be fair, the fact that I have a Masters worked in my favor when it came to salary negotiation).

To clarify, I'm talking about hard knowledge; facts and math and equations and wotnot. But even in terms of soft skills, university barely prepared me for professional life, and nearly all of the stuff I've used to get the job done has been learned on that job or on previous jobs.

You actually ARE talking about the same things, without quite realizing it. The reason these people have so much power is because of government intervention. Without Uncle Al (and now Uncle Ben) at the Federal Reserve, standing ready with the cash spigots at the first sign of trouble, most of these bad players would have been wiped out long ago.

As Buffett has said, it's only when the tide goes out that you find out who's been swimming naked, and the Federal Reserve is absolutely determined never to let the water get below shoulder depth.

Well stated!

NormanTheIntern wrote:

I did not possess the press credentials that NYPD allocates to journalists.

I wasn't aware that journalists needed "credentials" to cover a story in the largest, perhaps mores diverse city in the U.S.

goman wrote:

Occupy Wall Street should not be a pure left wing protest. But a protest for all Americans that are sick of corruption and tired of the obfuscating and political pandering.

Ironically the group most financially removed by Wall Street's utter lack of conscience and excess is the group that you'll never see sending any protesters.

“When I discovered a new plant, I sat down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its
acquaintance and hear what it had to tell.” -- John Muir

As an IT manager I can tell you that 98% of candidates who walk into the door for entry level positions as developers with CSE degrees know so little that they are nearly useless. You non techies can read this lovely blog post that pretty much sums up why any time I have to hire someone it gives me a pre-emptive headache.

It would, if we'd f*cking let it. But every time the economy tries to correct itself, we jump in and flood the system with more money to keep it doing what it has been doing.

So of COURSE it's wildly misadjusted and doing stupid things. We refuse to accept even the tiniest of recessions, so waste and fraud just keep piling up.

I think you missed my point. I'm not talking about government intervention in the economy. I'm talking about capitalism's inability to regulate itself in any meaningful way. There's nothing about capitalism or deregulation that stops Goldman Sachs from trying to corner a commodity market. If anything, I think it promotes it. There is no throttle on greed.

I think that you're both right, and wrong. Capitalism does a great job of regulating some things, so you really have to let it handle those things itself. Capitalism does a terrible job regulating other things, so you have to regulate those yourself.

Right now we are doing a lot of things close to right (like the... EPA, there, I said it), but we're over regulating things we should leave alone, like in the Fed, and there are a lot of areas I don't think we regulate as well as we should (for example I think that our definition of a monopoly should be a lot lower. The current Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, TMobile oligopoly is an example of that).

As an IT manager I can tell you that 98% of candidates who walk into the door for entry level positions as developers with CSE degrees know so little that they are nearly useless. You non techies can read this lovely blog post that pretty much sums up why any time I have to hire someone it gives me a pre-emptive headache.

Jonman is an aerospace engineer, and you're calling him a "non-techie?"
Edit - I'm probably just reading it wrong. Are you switching audiences between sentences?

As an IT manager I can tell you that 98% of candidates who walk into the door for entry level positions as developers with CSE degrees know so little that they are nearly useless. You non techies can read this lovely blog post that pretty much sums up why any time I have to hire someone it gives me a pre-emptive headache.

I think the problem is a bit worse than that, at least from a UK viewpoint. Each part of someone's education/career is only really concerned with themselves. For example a school only cares about the marks they get(*), universities pay lip service to skills that are going to be useful to earn a wage from (*2), and employers that expect the ideal employee to land in their lap (*3) yet don't want to invest in training. Another major factor which is sufficiently educating kids in the facts of getting a job and preparing them to make good decisions at the age we're asking them to make those decisions.

It's not a problem that's limited to liberal arts or non-vocational degrees. I got a Masters in Avionics, and here I am, 12 years into an engineering career, having worked in aerospace jobs my entire career, many of them in an avionics-specific role.

Care to guess what percentage of the things I learned at university I've used over those 12 years?

Maybe 1%, if I'm being generous. Four years of busting ass (well, 1 year of getting drunk and 3 years of busting ass if we're honest) didn't qualify me for sh*t. What it did was get my foot in the door for my first job, and everything since then has been based on experience and an increasingly impressive-looking resume. When I interviewed for my current job (5 years ago), it was the experience I had in previous jobs that landed me this one, not the letters after my name or the knowledge that came with them (although to be fair, the fact that I have a Masters worked in my favor when it came to salary negotiation).

To clarify, I'm talking about hard knowledge; facts and math and equations and wotnot. But even in terms of soft skills, university barely prepared me for professional life, and nearly all of the stuff I've used to get the job done has been learned on that job or on previous jobs.

Though to be fair, I bet most places would not have even looked at you with out the degree.

I did a computer engineering degree and I have friends with a ton of hands on IT experience. Yet still if we applied for the same job I would get it just because of the degree even though I have almost no desktop support experience.

Even if they are useless for a specific job a lot of companies use it to screen applicants.

I'm responding a little late to the original post, but just wanted to say that the overwhelming force being used against what seems to be peaceful protesters is exactly the stuff I saw happen during the WTO riots here in Seattle. Now, there were a group of anarchist idiots who riled up the local police force, but before it all ended the cops were firing rubber bullets and throwing tear gas at mostly peaceful crowds.

I'm saying this not because I'm an anarchist because I firmly believe in rule of law. Riots like what happened in the UK should be swiftly and harshly put down. But it also seems that when you see what's happening in NY, you get a glimpse behind the curtain at the police state that could so quickly swing into place. All that would be needed would be a national crisis.

To be honest, it's easy to say the blame lies in chasing short term results, but our behavior often reinforces this. Like, when you're picking 401k options, do you do a deep dive of each fund's investment philosphy, average turnover rate, etc? If you just look at posted return rates and pick the highest one, you are actually part of the problem.

This is dismissive at best. No one should expect the receptionist or janitor to be fluent in economics and finance in order to justify investing in the 401(k) offered by the company who employs them.

The gurus on Wall Street supposedly have that grand knowledge and still managed to drive our economy into the ground in 2008.

The receptionist and janitor lost a good amount of value in their 401(k)s. What, exactly, did the Wall Streeters lose?

"People don't need to be born again; they need to grow up." - Bishop Shelby Spong
"Medusa had a death stare too, until she met Phoenix Rev." - PRG013

There are times when one wonders how effective marches are—one of the lessons that the other side learned from the Vietnam era is that you can often ignore even really big protests without consequence—but in this case demonstrations could be very important just in terms of educating people about the fact that there is, in fact, a well-defined conflict out there with two sides to it.

There is a huge number of Americans who simply don't realize that they've been victimized by Wall Street – that they've paid inflated commodity prices due to irresponsible speculation and manipulation, seen their home values depressed thanks to corruption in the mortgage markets, subsidized banker bonuses with their tax dollars and/or been forced to pay usurious interest rates for consumer credit, among other things.

seen their home values depressed thanks to corruption in the mortgage markets,

That guy is awesome, and gets it better than almost anyone, but he's oversimplifying a bit here. More accurately, general consumers were fooled into paying too much for housing because of a bubble fueled by excess liquidity, low interest rates, and rampant speculation.

Housing is still overpriced, even now, in many parts of the country, and needs to adjust quite a long way further down to get back into more reasonable balance. If it's not allowed to, through continued manipulation of the money supply and interest rates, and direct manipulation of housing markets, then eventually, everything else will go UP, until housing is back in approximate balance.

I wasn't aware that journalists needed "credentials" to cover a story in the largest, perhaps mores diverse city in the U.S.

It seems pretty reasonable to set up some type of formal press credentials for an environment where mass arrests or containments seem likely. Put another way, if the cops start releasing people just because they say they're journalists, it doesn't take a 4 year psych degree from an accredited university to figure out what will happen. As has been noted several times in this thread, simply running around with a recording device doesn't automatically mean you're a journo anymore. Bottom line is, the fact that he didn't have press credentials undermines the idea that they're somehow deliberately cracking down on journalists.

To be honest, it's easy to say the blame lies in chasing short term results, but our behavior often reinforces this. Like, when you're picking 401k options, do you do a deep dive of each fund's investment philosphy, average turnover rate, etc? If you just look at posted return rates and pick the highest one, you are actually part of the problem.

This is dismissive at best. No one should expect the receptionist or janitor to be fluent in economics and finance in order to justify investing in the 401(k) offered by the company who employs them.

It's not dismissive, what I've just described is the underlying incentive for money managers to be so quick to jump on winners and sell losers, which in turn incentivizes companies to focus completely on quarterly results. If people rewarded money managers who focused on long term investing, things would be much different. Since that means investors are essentially giving up potential return (ie make less money), they won't do that unless bound by external rules or given a more concrete reason.

Either of which has to be provided by the government, which is why the protests are better served in Washington. Currently they're knd of protesting againt human nature and self interest

I wasn't aware that journalists needed "credentials" to cover a story in the largest, perhaps mores diverse city in the U.S.

It seems pretty reasonable to set up some type of formal press credentials for an environment where mass arrests or containments seem likely. Put another way, if the cops start releasing people just because they say they're journalists, it doesn't take a 4 year psych degree from an accredited university to figure out what will happen.

Why can't you arrest people that are behaving violently, and not arrest people that aren't behaving violently? I don't see what press credentials have to do with it. If Anderson Cooper starts choking a cop I want him arrested, if some peaceful protester that nobody knows or cares about, that doesn't have a national voice, is just standing there with a sign and shouting I don't want him arrested.

Connecticut Tea Party Patriots "Best Practices" memo on disrupting Town Hall meetings[/url] (warning, PDF)]→ Spread out in the hall and try to be in the front half. The objective is to put the Rep on the defensive with your questions and follow-up. The Rep should be made to feel that a majority, and if not, a significant portion of at least the audience, opposes the socialist agenda of Washington. They need to leave the hall with some doubts about their agenda. The other objective is to illustrate for the balance of the audience that the national leadership is acting against our founders' principles which are on the other side of the debate - and show them that there are a lot of solid citizens in the district who oppose the socialist approach to the nation's challenges. We want the independent thinkers to leave the hall with doubts about the Democrat solutions continually proposed by the national leadership.

→ You need to rock-the-boat early in the Rep's presentation, Watch for an opportunity to yell out and challenge the Rep's statements early. If he blames Bush for something or offers other excuses -- call him on it, yell back and have someone else follow-up with a shout-out. Don't carry on and make a scene - just short intermittent shout outs. The purpose is to make him uneasy early on and set the tone for the hall as clearly informal, and free-wheeling. It will also embolden others who agree with us to call out and challenge with tough questions. The goal is to rattle him, get him off his prepared script and agenda. If he says something outrageous, stand up and shout out and sit right down. Look for these opportunities before he even takes questions.

[Edit to add: more to the point, peaceful protesters should not be met with violence by the police - regardless of where either group is on the political spectrum.]

The arrested journalist's own article stipulated they were in the street and disrupting traffic.

The article in question wrote:

As more people spilled into the street, police started to demand that protesters stay on the sidewalk. But as people seemed to be retreating from harm's way, police began pushing the protesters. I saw police use large nets to corral people en masse. I watched as police pepper sprayed several young women in the face. (An NYPD spokesperson confirmed the use of pepper spray to MetroFocus.) I saw senior citizens and teenagers get arrested. I saw about 20 or 30 police officers tackle people and prod them roughly with police batons.

Sounds like folks were in the process of complying when NYPD decided it was time to get aggressive.

I still haven't seen any reports of protestors getting violent or behaving in a manner which would necessitate police use of pepper spray.

The arrested journalist's own article stipulated they were in the street and disrupting traffic.

Got it. So they need to go the the fenced and approved "protest zone". You don't really understand what a protest is, I take it. Incidentally this is the attitude that will ensure the US is a perpetual police state and nominal oligarchy. If you can't protest in a peaceful, but disorderly fashion nothing will change. People of color would still be at the back of the bus if obeying every small law was the standard for a proper protest.

To be honest, it's easy to say the blame lies in chasing short term results, but our behavior often reinforces this. Like, when you're picking 401k options, do you do a deep dive of each fund's investment philosphy, average turnover rate, etc? If you just look at posted return rates and pick the highest one, you are actually part of the problem.

This is dismissive at best. No one should expect the receptionist or janitor to be fluent in economics and finance in order to justify investing in the 401(k) offered by the company who employs them.

It's not dismissive, what I've just described is the underlying incentive for money managers to be so quick to jump on winners and sell losers, which in turn incentivizes companies to focus completely on quarterly results. If people rewarded money managers who focused on long term investing, things would be much different. Since that means investors are essentially giving up potential return (ie make less money), they won't do that unless bound by external rules or given a more concrete reason.

Either of which has to be provided by the government, which is why the protests are better served in Washington. Currently they're knd of protesting againt human nature and self interest :)

They are protesting corruption and abuse of power in Wall Street. Of course it is symbolic. Sure the laws are voted on in Washington but they are written on Wall Street.

The arrested journalist's own article stipulated they were in the street and disrupting traffic.

As someone who's been to a protest where people where arrested for "disrupting traffic," let me give you an idea of what that consists of. Once the cops told us to stay out of the street, all it took was one foot to come off the sidewalk and land in on pavement for them to force you to the ground, cuff you, and toss you in a paddy wagon. I don't really have a problem with them arresting people who were actually blocking traffic, nor there presence (as there are usually jerks in the the crowd who just want to cause trouble), but it's been my experience that they get extremely draconian when it comes to protecting traffic and ensuring orderly conduct during protests.